Identity Politics

The laden phrase “identity politics” has come to signify a
wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared
experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. Rather
than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic
manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations
typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific
constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that
constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their
distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive characterizations,
with the goal of greater self-determination.

The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of
large-scale political movements—second wave feminism, Black
Civil Rights in the U.S., gay and lesbian liberation, and the American
Indian movements, for example—based in claims about the
injustices done to particular social groups. These social movements
are undergirded by and foster a philosophical body of literature that
takes up questions about the nature, origin and futures of the
identities being defended. Identity politics as a mode of organizing
is intimately connected to the idea that some social groups are
oppressed; that is, that one's identity as a woman or as a Native
American, for example, makes one peculiarly vulnerable to cultural
imperialism (including stereotyping, erasure, or appropriation of
one's group identity), violence, exploitation, marginalization, or
powerlessness (Young 1990). Identity politics starts from analyses of
oppression to recommend, variously, the reclaiming, redescription, or
transformation of previously stigmatized accounts of group
membership. Rather than accepting the negative scripts offered by a
dominant culture about one's own inferiority, one transforms one's own
sense of self and community, often through consciousness-raising. For
example, in their germinal statement of Black feminist identity
politics, the Combahee River Collective argued that “as children
we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated
different—for example, when we were told in the same breath to
be quiet both for the sake of being ‘ladylike’ and to make
us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. In the process of
consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognize
the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing
consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and
inevitably end our oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1982,
14–15).

The scope of political movements that may be described as identity
politics is broad: the examples used in the philosophical literature
are predominantly of struggles within western capitalist democracies,
but indigenous rights movements worldwide, nationalist projects, or
demands for regional self-determination use similar arguments.
Predictably, there is no straightforward criterion that makes a
political struggle into an example of “identity politics;”
rather, the term signifies a loose collection of political projects,
each undertaken by representatives of a collective with a
distinctively different social location that has hitherto been
neglected, erased, or suppressed. It is beyond the scope of this essay
to offer historical or sociological surveys of the many different
social movements that might be described as identity politics,
although some references to this literature are provided in the
bibliography; instead the focus here is to provide an overview of the
philosophical issues in the expansive literature in political
theory.

The phrase “identity politics” is also something of a
philosophical punching-bag for a variety of critics. Often challenges
fail to make sufficiently clear their object of critique, using
“identity politics” as a blanket description that invokes
a range of tacit political failings (as discussed in Bickford
1997). From a contemporary perspective, some early identity claims by
political activists certainly seem naive, totalizing, or
unnuanced. However, the public rhetoric of identity politics served
useful and empowering purposes for some, even while it sometimes
belied the philosophical complexity of any claim to a shared
experience or common group characteristics. Since the twentieth
century heyday of the well known political movements that made
identity politics so visible, a vast academic literature has sprung
up; although “identity politics” can draw on intellectual
precursors from Mary Wollstonecraft to Frantz Fanon, writing that
actually uses this specific phrase, with all its contemporary baggage,
is limited almost exclusively to the last twenty years. Thus it was
barely as intellectuals started to systematically outline and defend
the philosophical underpinnings of identity politics that we
simultaneously began to challenge them. At this historical juncture,
then, asking whether one is for or against identity politics is to ask
an impossible question. Wherever they line up in the debates, thinkers
agree that the notion of identity has become indispensable to
contemporary political discourse, at the same time as they concur that
it has troubling implications for models of the self, political
inclusiveness, and our possibilities for solidarity and
resistance.

From this brief examination of how identity politics fits into the
political landscape it is already clear that the use of the
controversial term “identity” raises a host of
philosophical questions. Logical uses aside, it is likely familiar to
philosophers from the literature in metaphysics on personal
identity—one's sense of self and its persistence. Indeed, underlying
many of the more overtly pragmatic debates about the merits of
identity politics are philosophical questions about the nature of
subjectivity and the self (Taylor 1989). Charles Taylor argues that
the modern identity is characterized by an emphasis on its inner voice
and capacity for authenticity—that is, the ability to
find a way of being that is somehow true to oneself (Taylor in
Gutmann, ed. 1994). While doctrines of equality press the notion that
each human being is capable of deploying his or her practical reason
or moral sense to live an authentic live qua individual, the politics
of difference has appropriated the language of authenticity to
describe ways of living that are true to the identities of
marginalized social groups. As Sonia Kruks puts it:

What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier,
pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for
recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has
previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks,
qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is
not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind”
on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect
“in spite of” one's differences. Rather, what is demanded
is respect for oneself as different (2001, 85).

For many proponents of identity politics this demand for authenticity
includes appeals to a time before oppression, or a culture or way of
life damaged by colonialism, imperialism, or even genocide. Thus for
example Taiaiake Alfred, in his defense of a return to traditional
indigenous values, argues that:

Indigenous governance systems embody distinctive political values,
radically different from those of the mainstream. Western notions of
domination (human and natural) are noticeably absent; in their place
we find harmony, autonomy, and respect. We have a responsibility to
recover, understand, and preserve these values, not only because they
represent a unique contribution to the history of ideas, but because
renewal of respect for traditional values is the only lasting solution
to the political, economic, and social problems that beset our
people. (Alfred 1999, 5)

What is crucial about the “identity” of identity politics
appears to be the experience of the subject, especially his or her
experience of oppression and the possibility of a shared and more
authentic or self-determined alternative. Thus identity politics rests
on unifying claims about the meaning of politically laden experiences
to diverse individuals. Sometimes the meaning attributed to a
particular experience will diverge from that of its subject: thus, for
example, the woman who struggles desperately to be attractive may
think that she is simply trying to be a better person, rather than
understanding her experience as part of the disciplining of female
bodies in a patriarchal culture. Making sense of such disjunctions
relies on notions such as false consciousness—the systematic
mystification of the experience of the oppressed by the perspective of
the dominant. Thus despite the disagreements of many defenders of
identity political claims with Marxism and other radical political
models, they share the view that individuals' perceptions of their own
interests may be systematically distorted and must be somehow freed of
their misperceptions by group-based transformation.

Concern about this aspect of identity politics has crystallized
around the transparency of experience to the oppressed, and the
univocality of its interpretation. Experience is never, critics argue,
simply epistemically available prior to interpretation (Scott 1992);
rather it requires a theoretical framework—implicit or
explicit—to give it meaning. Moreover, if experience is the
origin of politics, then some critics worry that what Kruks (2001)
calls “an epistemology of provenance” will become the
norm: on this view, political perspectives gain legitimacy by virtue
of their articulation by subjects of particular experiences. This,
critics charge, closes off the possibility of critique of these
perspectives by those who don't share the experience, which in turn
inhibits political dialogue and coalition-building. Nonetheless,
poststructuralist skepticism about the possibility of experience
outside a hermeneutic frame has been countered with phenomenological
attempts to articulate a ground for experience in the lived body
(Alcoff 2000; see also Oksala 2004 and 2011; Stoller 2009).

From these understandings of subjectivity, it is easy to see how
critics of identity politics, and even some cautious supporters, have
feared that it is prone to essentialism. This expression is
another philosophical term of abuse, intended to capture a multitude
of sins. In its original contexts in metaphysics, the term implies
the belief that an object has a certain quality by virtue of which it
is what it is; for Locke, famously, the essence of a triangle is that
it is a three-sided shape. In the contemporary humanities the term is
used more loosely to imply, most commonly, an illegitimate
generalization about identity (Heyes 2000). In the case of identity
politics, two claims stand out as plausibly
“essentialist:” the first is the understanding of the
subject that characterizes a single axis of identity as discrete and
taking priority in representing the self—as if being Asian-American,
for example, were entirely separable from being a woman. To the extent
that identity politics urges mobilization around a single axis, it
will put pressure on participants to identify that axis as their
defining feature, when in fact they may well understand themselves as
integrated selves who cannot be represented so selectively or even
reductively (Spelman 1988). The second form of essentialism is closely
related to the first: generalizations made about particular social
groups in the context of identity politics may come to have a
disciplinary function within the group, not just describing but also
dictating the self-understanding that its members should have. Thus,
the supposedly liberatory new identity may inhibit autonomy, as
Anthony Appiah puts it, replacing “one kind of tyranny with
another” (Appiah in Gutmann ed. 1994, 163). Just as dominant
groups in the culture at large insist that the marginalized integrate
by assimilating to dominant norms, so within some practices of
identity politics dominant sub-groups may, in theory and practice,
impose their vision of the group's identity onto all its members. For
example, in his films Black Is, Black Ain't and Tongues
Untied Marlon Riggs eloquently portrays the exclusion of Black
women and gay Black men from heterosexist and masculinist
understandings of African-American identity politics.

Or, theorizing the experience of hybridity for those whose identities
are especially far from norms of univocality, Gloria Anzaldúa,
for example, famously writes of her mestiza identity as a
Chicana, American, raised poor, a lesbian and a feminist, living in
the metaphoric and literal Borderlands of the American Southwest
(Anzaldúa 1999 [1987]). Some suggest the deployment of
“strategic essentialism:” we should act as ifan
identity were uniform only to achieve interim political goals, without
implying any deeper authenticity (Spivak 1990, 1–16). Others argue
that a relational social ontology, which makes clear the fluidity and
interdependence of social groups, should be developed as an
alternative to the reification of other approaches to identity
politics (Young 2000; Nelson 2001). These accounts of subjectivity,
ontologies, and ways of understanding solidarity and relationships are
at the forefront of contemporary philosophical scholarship in identity
politics.

A key condition of possibility for contemporary identity politics was
institutionalized liberal democracy (Brown 1995). The citizen
mobilizations that made democracy real also shaped and unified groups
previously marginal to the polity, while extensions of formal rights
invited expectations of material and symbolic equality. The perceived
paucity of rewards offered by liberal capitalism, however, spurred
forms of radical critique that sought to explain the persistence of
oppression. At the most basic philosophical level, critics of
liberalism suggested that liberal social ontology—the model of
the nature of and relationship between subjects and
collectives—was misguided. The social ontology of most liberal political
theories consists of citizens conceptualized as essentially similar
individuals, as for example in John Rawls' famous thought experiment
using the “original position,” in which representatives of
the citizenry are conceptually divested of all specific identities or
affiliations in order to make rational decisions about the social
contract (Rawls 1970). To the extent that group interests are
represented in liberal polities, they tend to be understood as
associational, forms of interest group pluralism whereby those sharing
particular interests voluntarily join together to create a political
lobby. Citizens are free to register their individual preferences
(through voting, for example), or to aggregate themselves for the
opportunity to lobby more systematically (e.g. by forming an
association such as a neighborhood community league). These lobbies,
however, are not defined by the identity of their members so much as
by specific shared interests and goals, and when pressing their case
the marginalized subjectivity of the group members is not itself
called into question. Finally, political parties, the other primary
organs of liberal democratic government, critics suggest, have few
moments of inclusivity, being organized around party discipline,
responsiveness to lobby groups, and broad-based electoral
popularity. Ultimately conventional liberal democracy, diverse radical
critics claim, cannot effectively address the ongoing structural
marginalization that persists in late capitalist liberal states, and
may even be complicit with it (Young 1990; P. Williams 1991; Brown
1995; M. Williams 1998).

On a philosophical level, these understandings of the political
subject and its relationship to collectivity came to seem inadequate
to ensuring representation for women, gays and lesbians, or
racial-ethnic groups (M. Williams 1998). Critics charged that the
neutral citizen of liberal theory was in fact the bearer of an
identity coded white, male, bourgeois, able-bodied, and heterosexual
(Pateman 1988; Young 1990; Di Stefano 1991; Mills 1997; Pateman and Mills 2007). This implicit
ontology in part explained the persistent historical failure of
liberal democracies to achieve anything more than token inclusion in
power structures for members of marginalized groups. A richer
understanding of political subjects as constituted through and by
their social location was required. In particular, the history and
experience of oppression brought with it certain perspectives and
needs that could not be assimilated through existing liberal
structures. Individuals are oppressed by virtue of their membership in
a particular social group—that is, a collective whose
members have relatively little mobility into or out of the collective,
who usually experience their membership as involuntary, who are
generally identified as members by others, and whose opportunities are
deeply shaped by the relation of their group to corollary groups
through privilege and oppression (Cudd 2006). Oppression, then, is the systematic
limiting of opportunity or constraints on self-determination because
of such membership: for example, Frantz Fanon eloquently describes the
experience of being always constrained by the white gaze as a Black
man: “I already knew that there were legends, stories, history,
and above all historicity… I was responsible at the
same time for my body, my race, for my ancestors” (Fanon 1968,
112). Conversely, members of dominant groups are
privileged—systematically
advantaged by the deprivations imposed on the
oppressed. For example, in a widely cited article Peggy McIntosh
identifies whiteness as a dominant identity, and lists 47 ways in
which she is advantaged by being white compared with her colleagues of
color. These range from being able to buy “flesh-colored”
Band-Aids that will match her skin tone, to knowing that she can be
rude without provoking negative judgments of her racial group, to
being able to buy a house in a middle-class community without risking
neighbors' disapproval (1993).

Critics have also charged that assimilation (or, less
provocatively, integration) is a guiding principle of liberalism. If
the liberal subject is coded in the way Young (1990) suggests, then
attempts to apply liberal norms of equality will risk demanding that
the marginalized conform to the identities of their oppressors. For
example, many gays and lesbians have objected to campaigns to
institute “gay marriage” on the grounds that these legal
developments assimilate same-sex relationships to a heterosexual
model, rather than challenging its historical, material, and symbolic
terms (e.g. Card 2007). If this is equality, they claim, then it looks
suspiciously like the erasure of socially subordinate identities
rather than their genuine incorporation into the polity. This
suspicion helps to explain the affiliation of identity politics with
separatism. This latter is a set of positions that share the
view that attempts at integration of dominant and marginalized groups
so consistently compromise the identity or potential of the less
powerful that a distinct social and political space is the only
structure that will adequately protect them. In Canada, for example,
Québec separatists claim that the French language and
francophone culture are persistently erased within an overwhelmingly
dominant Anglo-American continent, despite the efforts of the Canadian
state to maintain its official bilingualism and to integrate
Québec into the nation. Given their long history of conflict
and marginalization, a separate and sovereign Québec, they
argue, is the only plausible solution (e.g. Laforest in Beiner and
Norman 2001). Analogous arguments have been made on behalf of Native
American and other indigenous peoples and African Americans
(e.g. Alfred 1999, Asante 2000). Lesbian feminist separatists have
claimed that the central mechanism for the oppression of women under
patriarchy is heterosexuality. Understanding heterosexuality as a
forced contract or compulsory institution, they argue that women's
relationships with men are persistently characterized by domination
and subordination. Only divorce (literal and figurative) and the
creation of new geographic and political communities of
woman-identified women will end patriarchal exploitation, and forge a
liberatory female identity (Rich 1980; Frye 1983; Radicalesbians 1988;
Wittig 1992).

One of the central charges against identity politics by liberals,
among others, has been its alleged reliance on notions of sameness to
justify political mobilization. Looking for people who are
like you rather than who share your political values as
allies runs the risk of sidelining critical political analysis of
complex social locations and ghettoizing members of social groups as
the only persons capable of making or understanding claims to
justice. After an initial wave of relatively uncompromising identity
politics, proponents have taken these criticisms to heart and moved to
more philosophically nuanced accounts that appeal to
coalitions as better organizing structures. On this view,
separatism around a single identity formation must be muted by
recognition of the internally heterogeneous and overlapping nature of
social group memberships. The idea of a dominant identity from which
the oppressed may need to dissociate themselves remains, but the
alternative becomes a more fluid and diverse grouping, less intent on
guarantees of internal homogeneity and more concerned with identifying
“family resemblances” than literal identity (Heyes
2000).

This trajectory—from formal inclusion in liberal polities, to
assertions of difference and new demands under the rubric of identity
politics, to internal and external critique of identity political
movements—has taken different forms in relation to different
identities. Increasingly it is difficult to see what divides
contemporary positions, and some commentators have suggested possible
rapprochements between liberalism and identity politics (e.g.
Laden 2001). A problem in sorting through such claims is the vagueness
of philosophical discussions of identity politics, which are often
content to list their rubric under the mantra of “gender, race,
class, etc.” although these three are not obviously analogous,
nor is it clear which identities are gestured toward by the
predictable “etc.” (or why they do not merit
naming). Class in particular has a distinctively different political
history, and contemporary critics of identity politics, as I'll
discuss below, often take themselves to be defending class analysis
against identity politics' depoliticizing effects. Of those many forms
of identity politics to which large academic literatures attach,
however, I'll briefly highlight key issues concerning gender,
sexuality, and a complex cluster of race, ethnicity and
multiculturalism.

Twentieth century feminism has consistently opposed biological
determinism: the view that shared biological features among a certain
group lead inevitably to certain social roles or functions. For
example, one early opponent of women's suffrage suggested that women
and men had different metabolic systems—katabolic (or
“energy-expending”) in men, and anabolic (or
“energy-conserving”) in women—that precluded
women's effective or informed participation in politics (see Moi 2000,
3–21 for discussion). Feminist identity politics, then, takes up the
task of articulating women's understandings of themselves (and of men)
without reducing femininity (or masculine dominance) to
biology. Whatever experiences women share will be experiences of
femininity not necessarily resulting from an immutable sexual
difference but rather from social injustice. Put less usefully,
perhaps, although sex (the features of bodies we typically aggregate
as male and female) may be biological, gender (the social roles we
call femininity and masculinity) is “socially
constructed.” Claims about the “social construction”
of the identities of identity politics permeate the field as a logical
extension of its mandate, although with tremendous philosophical
vagueness attaching to the content of the phrase, which serves
primarily to emphasize the contingency of (the content of) any
particular category or concept (see Haslanger 1995, 2005; Hacking
1999). The fear of biological determinism has led to tremendous
caution in feminist theorizing: any invocation of features of female
bodies as a basis for identity political claims risks being seen as
(inadvertently) complicit with sexist views. Furthermore, the very
idea of reclaiming women's identities from patriarchy has been
criticized as merely an affirmation of a slave morality—a
Nietzschean term describing the attachments of the oppressed as they
rationalize and valorize their condition. Attempts from various
quarters to capture and revalue the distinctively feminine (by
theorizing, for example, “maternal thinking,” [Ruddick
1989], or écriture féminine [Cixous 1976]) risk,
critics claim, endorsing existing power relations. Thus the heated
debates surrounding the “ethic of care” in moral
psychology, for example, line up around two constellations of
positions: on the one hand, advocates of the ethic of care as a
distinctively feminine contribution to moral reasoning point to its
benefits for negotiating a human social world characterized by webs of
relationship, and to the pathologies of the dissociation that is
culturally linked to masculinities. Carol Gilligan is the best known
proponent of this position (although the details of her complex
paradigm are often glossed over or misrepresented) (Gilligan 1993
[1982]). Her critics charge that she reifies femininity—were
women not oppressed, they would not speak in the voice of care, thus
casting doubt on the desirability of attempts to reclaim it as part of
a liberatory framework. In other words, the current construction of
femininity is so deeply imbricated with the oppression of women that
such attempts will always end up reinforcing the very discourse they
seek to undermine (Butler 1999 [1990]); this critique has strong
affiliations with poststructuralism (which are discussed below).

The narrative of feminist interpretation of gender relations most
commonly offered points to universalizing claims made on behalf of
women during the so-called “second wave” of the feminist
movement in the late 1960's and 1970's in Western countries. The most
often discussed (and criticized) second wave feminist icons—women
such as Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem—are white,
middle-class, and heterosexual, although this historical picture too
often neglects the contributions of lesbian feminists, feminists of
color, and working-class feminists, which were less visible in popular
culture, perhaps, but arguably equally influential in the lives of
women. For some early radical feminists, women's oppression as
women was the core of identity politics, and should not be
diluted with other identity issues. For example, Shulamith Firestone,
in her classic book The Dialectic of Sex, argued that
“racism is sexism extended,” and that the Black
Power movement represented only sexist cooptation of Black women into
a new kind of subservience to Black men. Thus for Black women to fight
racism (especially among white women) was to divide the feminist
movement, which properly focused on challenging patriarchy, understood
as struggle between men and women, the foundational dynamic of all
oppressions (Firestone 1970, esp. 103–120).

Claims about the universality of gender made during the second wave
have been extensively criticized in feminist theory for failing to
recognize the specificity of their own constituencies. For example,
Friedan's famous proposition that women needed to get out of the
household and into the professional workplace was, bell hooks pointed
out, predicated on the experience of a post-war generation of white,
middle-class married women confined to housekeeping and child-rearing
by their professional husbands (Friedan 1963; hooks 1981). Many women
of color and working-class women had worked outside their homes
(sometimes in other women's homes) for decades; some lesbians
had a history of working in traditionally male occupations or living
alternative domestic lives without a man's “family wage.”
Similarly, some women from the less developed world have been critical
of Northern feminist theory for globalizing its claims. Such moves
construct “Third World” women, they argue, as less developed or enlightened
versions of their “First World” counterparts, rather than understanding
their distinctively different situation (Mohanty 1988); or, they
characterize liberation for Northern women in ways that exacerbate the
exploitation of the global poor: by supporting economic conditions in which
increasing numbers of western women can abuse immigrant domestic
workers, for example (Anderson 2000). The question of what a global feminism should make of identity political claims, or how it should conceive solidarity among women from massively different locations within the global economic system remains open (Weir 2008).

Thus feminist claims made about the oppression of women founded in a
notion of shared experience and identity are now invariably greeted
with philosophical suspicion. Some critics have charged that this
suspicion itself has become excessive, undercutting the very
possibility of generalizations about women that gives feminist theory
its force (Martin 1994), or that it marks the distancing of feminist
philosophy from its roots in political organizing. Others suggest
alternative methods for feminist theory that will minimize the
emphasis on shared criteria of membership in a social group and stress
instead the possibilities for alliances founded on non-identical
connections (Young 1997; Heyes 2000; Cornell 2000). It is commonplace
to hear that “identity” is a term in serious crisis in
feminist thought, and that feminist praxis must move beyond identity
politics (Dean 1996). Nonetheless, sex-gender as a set of analytical
categories continues to guide feminist thought, albeit in troubled and
troubling ways.

Nowhere have conceptual struggles over identity been more pronounced
than in the lesbian and gay liberation movement. The notion that
sexual object choice can define who a person is has been profoundly
challenged by the advent of queer politics. Visible early lesbian and
gay activists emphasized the immutable and essential natures of their
sexual identities. For some, they were a distinctively different
natural kind of person, with the same rights as heterosexuals (another
natural kind) to find fulfillment in marriage, property ownership, and
so on. This strand of gay organizing (perhaps associated more closely
with white, middle-class gay men, at least until the radicalizing
effects of the AIDS pandemic) with its complex simultaneous appeals to
difference and to sameness has a genealogy going back to pre-Stonewall
homophilic activism (see discussion in Terry, esp. 353–7). While early
lesbian feminists had a very different politics, oriented around
liberation from patriarchy and the creation of separate spaces for
woman-identified women, many still appealed to a more authentic,
distinctively feminist self. Heterosexual feminine identities were
products of oppression, yet the literature imagines a utopian
alternative where woman-identification will liberate the lesbian
within every woman (e.g. Radicalesbians 1988).

The paradigm shift that the term “queer” signals, then,
is a shift to a model in which identities are more self-consciously
historicized, seen as contingent products of particular genealogies
rather than enduring or essential natural kinds (Phelan 1989 and 1994;
Blasius 2001). Michel Foucault's work, especially his History of
Sexuality, is the most widely cited progenitor of this view:
Foucault famously argues that “homosexuality appeared as one of
the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of
sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the
soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was
now a species” (Foucault 1980, 43). Although Foucault is the
most often cited as the originator of such genealogical arguments
about homosexuality, other often neglected writers contributed to the
emergence of this new paradigm (e.g. M. McIntosh 1968). In western
popular culture such theories co-exist uneasily with biologically
essentialist accounts of sexual identity, which look for a particular
gene, brain structure, or other biological feature that is
noninteractive with environment and that will explain same-sex sexual
desire. At stake are not only epistemological and metaphysical
questions about how we can know what kind of thing “sexual
orientation” might be, but also a host of moral and political
questions. If sexual identity is biologically caused, then it is as
hard to hold an individual morally responsible for being homosexual as
it is to blame someone for being Black (which may not be as hard as
some would like to think). Some gay activists thus see biological
explanations of sexuality as offering a defense against homophobic
commentators who believe that gays can voluntarily change their
“immoral” desires. Indeed, much of the intuitive hostility
to genealogical or social constructionist accounts of sexuality within
gay and lesbian communities seems to come from the dual sense of many
individuals that they could not have been other than gay, and that
anything less than a radically essentialist view of sexuality will
open the door to further attempts to “cure” them of their
homosexuality (through “ex-gay ministries,” for
example).

Whatever the truth of these fears, Eve Sedgwick is right, in my view,
to say that no specific form of explanation for the origins of sexual
preference will be proof against the infinitely varied strategies of
homophobia (Sedgwick 1990, esp. 22–63). That sexual orientation takes
on a metaphysical life of its own, for example, elides the fact that
it is generally sexual behavior—not an abstract
“identity”—that is the object of moral
disapprobation. Queer politics, then, works to trouble the
categories “gay” and “lesbian,” as well as
“heterosexual” (or indeed other categories of social thought
in general), and eschews a genetic quest for the origins of
homosexuality. In addition to historicizing and contextualizing
sexuality, including the very idea of sexual identity, the shift to
queer is also characterized by deconstructive methods. Rather than
understanding sexual identities as a set of discrete and independent
social types, queer theorists adduce evidence and read to emphasize
their mutual implication: for example, such thinkers love to point out
that the word “homosexuality” first appears in English in
1897, but the term “heterosexuality” is back-formed, first
used some years later (Garber 1995, 39–42). Heterosexuality comes into
existence as a way of understanding the nature of individuals
after the homosexual has been diagnosed; homosexuality
requires heterosexuality as its opposite, despite its
self-professed stand-alone essence. Queer theorists point out that the
homo/hetero dichotomy, like many others in western intellectual
history that it arguably draws on and reinforces, is not only mutually
implicated, but also hierarchical (heterosexuality is superior,
normal, and originary, while homosexuality is inferior, deviant, and
derivative) and masquerades as natural or descriptive. The task of a
more radical “identity politics,” on this vision, is to
constantly denaturalize and deconstruct the identities in question,
with a political goal of their subversion rather than their
accommodation.

An exemplary conflict within the identity politics of sexuality
focuses on the expansion of gay and lesbian organizing to those with
other queer affiliations, especially bisexual and transgendered
activists. Skepticism about inclusion of these groups in
organizational mandates, community centers, parades, and festivals has
origins in more traditional understandings of identity politics that
see reclaiming lesbian and/or gay identity from its corruption in a
homophobic society as a task compromised by those whose identities are
read as diluted, treacherous, ambiguous, or peripheral. Some lesbian
feminist critiques of transgender, for example, see male-to-female
transsexuals in particular as male infiltrators of women's space,
individuals so intent on denying their male privilege that they will
modify their bodies and attempt to pass as women to do it; bisexual
women dabble in lesbian life, but flee to straight privilege when
occasion demands (see Heyes 2003 for references and discussion). These
arguments have been challenged in turn by writers who see them as
attempts to justify purity of identity that merely replace the old
exclusions with new dictatorships (Stone 1991, Lugones 1994) and
inhibit coalitional organizing against conservative foes.

Similar debates in philosophy of race highlight the contingent and
historical nature of “race” as a category of
identity. Despite a complex history of biological essentialism in the
presentation of racial typologies, the notion of a genetic basis to
racial difference has been largely discredited; the criteria different
societies (at different times) use to organize and hierarchize
“racial formations” are political and contingent (Omi and
Winant 1986). While skin color, appearance of facial features, or hair
type are in some trivial sense genetically determined, the grouping of
different persons into races does not pick out any patterned
biological difference (although see the debate “Is Race Real?” in the
internet resources. What it does pick out is a set of social meanings
with political ramifications (Alcoff 1997, 2006). The most notorious
example of an attempt to rationalize racial difference as biological
is the) U.S. “one-drop rule,” under which an individual
was characterized as Black if they had “one drop” or more
of “Black blood.” Adrian Piper points out that not only
does this belief persist into contemporary readings of racial
identity, it also implies that given the prolonged history of racial
mixing in the US—both coerced and voluntary—very
significant numbers of nominally “white” people in the
U.S. today should be re-classified as “Black” (Piper
1996). In those countries that have had official racial
classifications, individuals' struggles to be re-classified (almost
always as a member of a more privileged racial group) are often
invoked to highlight the contingency of race, especially at the
borders of its categories. And a number of histories of racial groups
that have apparently changed their racial identification—Jews,
Italians, or the Irish, for example—also illustrate social
constructionist theses (Ignatiev 1995). The claim that race is
“socially constructed,” however, does not in itself mark
out a specific identity politics. Indeed, the very contingency of race
and its lack of correlation with categories that have more meaning in
everyday life (such as ethnicity or culture) may circumscribe its
political usefulness: just as feminists have found the limits of
appeals to “women's identity,” so Asian-Americans may find
with ethnicities and cultures as diverse as Chinese, Indian, or
Vietnamese that their racial designation itself provides little common
ground. That a US citizen of both Norwegian and Ashkenazi Jewish
heritage will check that they are “white” on a census form
says relatively little (although nonetheless something) about their
experience of their identity, or indeed of their very different
relationship to anti-Semitism. Tropes of separatism and the search for
forms of authentic self-expression are related to race via
ethno-cultural understandings of identity: for example, the
U.S. Afro-centric movement appeals to the cultural significance of
African heritage for Black Americans (Asante 2000).

Racial categories are perhaps most politically significant in their
contested relation to racism. Racism attempts to reduce members of
social groups to their racial features, drawing on a complex history
of racial stereotypes to do so. Racism is arguably analogous to other
forms of oppression in being both overt and institutionalized,
manifested both as deliberate acts by individuals and as unplanned
systemic outcomes. The specific direction of US discussion of the
categories of race has been around color-blind versus color-conscious
public policy (Appiah and Gutmann 1996). Color-blindness—that
is, the view that race should be ignored in public policy and
everyday exchange—has hegemony in popular discourse. Drawing
attention to race—whether in a personal description or in
university admissions procedures—is unfair and
racist. Advocates of color-consciousness, on the other hand, argue
that racism will not disappear without proactive efforts, which
require the invocation of race. Thus affirmative action, for example,
requires statistics about the numbers of members of oppressed racial
groups employed in certain contexts, which in turn requires racial
identification and categorization. Thus those working against racism
face a paradox familiar in identity politics: the very identity they
aim to dispel must be invoked to make their case.

The literature on multiculturalism takes up questions of race,
ethnicity, and cultural diversity in relation to the liberal state.
Some multicultural states—notably Canada—allegedly aim
to permit the various cultural identities of their residents to be
preserved rather than assimilated, despite the concern that the
over-arching liberal aims of such states may be at odds with the
values of those they claim to protect. For example, Susan Moller Okin
argues that multiculturalism is sometimes bad for women, especially
when it works to preserve patriarchal values in minority cultures. If
multiculturalism implies a form of cultural relativism that prevents
judgment of or interference with the “private” practices
of minorities, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, compulsory
veiling, or being deprived of education may be the consequence. Okin's
critics counter that she falsely portrays culture as static,
internally homogeneous, and defined by men's values, allowing
liberalism to represent a culturally unmarked medium for the defense
of individual rights (Okin et al 1999). For many commentators on
multiculturalism this is the nub of the issue: is there an
inconsistency between defending the rights of minority cultures, while
prohibiting those (allegedly) cultural practices that the state judges
illiberal (Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005; Phillips 2007)? Can
liberalism sustain the cultural and value-neutrality that some
commentators still ascribe to it, or to what extent should it embrace
its own cultural specificity (Taylor, Habermas in Gutmann, ed. 1994;
Lawrence and Herzog, eds. 1994; Kymlicka, ed. 1995; Deveaux 2000)?
Defenders of the right to cultural expression of minorities in
multicultural states thus practice forms of identity politics that are
both made possible by liberalism and sometimes in tension with it (see
Laden and Owen eds. 2007).

Since its 1970s vogue, identity politics as a mode of organizing and
set of political philosophical positions has undergone numerous
attacks by those motivated to point to its flaws, whether by its
pragmatic exclusions or more programmatically. For many leftist commentators, in particular, identity
politics is something of a bête noire, representing the
capitulation to cultural criticism in place of analysis of the
material roots of oppression. Marxists, both orthodox and revisionist,
and socialists—especially those who came of age during the
rise of the New Left in western countries—have often
interpreted the perceived ascendancy of identity politics as
representing the end of radical materialist critique (see discussions
in Farred 2000 and McNay 2008, 126–161). Identity politics, for these critics, is both
factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the
ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural
accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged. For example,
while allowing that both recognition and redistribution have a place
in contemporary politics, Nancy Fraser laments the supremacy of
perspectives that take injustice to inhere in “cultural”
constructions of identity that the people to whom they are attributed
want to reject. Such recognition models, she argues, require remedies
that “valorize the group's ‘groupness’ by
recognizing its specificity,” thus reifying identities that
themselves are products of oppressive structures. By contrast,
injustices of distribution require redistributive remedies that aim
“to put the group out of business as a group” (Fraser
1997, 19).

The reasons given for the alleged turn away from economic oppression
to themes of culture, language, and identity in contemporary politics
differ. First, the institutionalization of North American radicalism
in the middle-class bastion of academia creates incentives for
intellectuals to minimize the political importance of their own class
privilege, and focus instead on other identities (in turn divorced
from their economic inflections). Second, as Wendy Brown suggests,
capitalist suffering may have been displaced onto other identities,
interpreted through the lens of class aspiration (Brown 1995,
59–60). Third, the turn away from economic analysis may be less
dramatic than some critics believe. Global capitalism is widening the
gap between the over- and less-developed countries, and working to
further marginalize women, ethnic or indigenous minorities, and the
disabled in the so-called Third and Fourth
Worlds.[1]
A now
longstanding anti-global-capital movement has grappled with identity
political issues for some time (see Lott 2000). How is twenty-first
century anti-capitalist activism imbricated with identity politics
(Upping the Anti 2005)? The enormous tangible consequences of
the 2008 economic crisis, subsequent public outrage about economic
inequalities, and the 2011 “Occupy” movement motivate a
widespread and growing return to left economic critique that signals a
new class politics. There is already discussion of the relationship
between popular protest against inequalities of wealth and other
political movements: What does Occupy owe to feminist and civil rights
organizing and consciousness-raising tactics, and why should worsening
economic disparities be understood as feminist and anti-racist
struggles as well as struggles of class? Has Occupy in North America
reckoned with its implication with the history of settler colonialism?
More radically, does Occupy indicate a radical departure from old
understandings of ideology versus identity, and refocus political
attention on “meaning, action, and feeling” (Protevi 2011)
or on the significance of embodied action in shared space (Butler
2011)?

More general debates about the philosophical adequacy of a politics of
recognition continue: for example, in her 2008 book Against
Recognition, Lois McNay argues that identity claims that are at
the heart of many contemporary social movements are represented as
demands for recognition in the context of an over-simplified account
of power. Although theorists of recognition typically start from a
Hegelian model of the subject as dialogically formed and necessarily
situated, they too quickly abandon the radical consequences of such a
view for subject formation, McNay argues. The subject of recognition
becomes both personalized and hypostatized—divorced from the
larger social systems of power that create conditions of possibility
for particular “identities” (2008, esp. 1–23). In
this way, the debates around subject-formation that are at the heart
of philosophical discussions of identity politics parallel debates
between Habermasians and Foucauldians about the possibility of a
transcendental subject that can ground practices of critique (see
Allen 2008).

The problems that motivated identity political movements are not
gone in 2012: Aboriginal cultures are often ignored in mainstream
educational systems, violence against women still permeates our lives,
“equality” for queer people is still typically premised on
sameness to privileged heterosexual subjectivity, and so
on. Nonetheless, the very term “identity politics” seems
in many ways hopelessly outmoded. Models premised on categorical
identification seem increasingly inadequate to the complexities of our
becomings, and intra-group sameness as the basis of political
solidarity feels not only exclusionary but also too heavily predicated
on negation and loss.

In particular, poststructuralist challengers charge that identity
politics rests on a mistaken view of the subject that assumes
a metaphysics of substance—that is, that a cohesive,
self-identical subject is ontologically (if not actually) prior to any
form of social injustice (Butler 1999). This subject has certain core
essential attributes that define her or his identity, over which are
imposed forms of socialization that cause her or him to internalize
other nonessential attributes. This position, they suggest,
misrepresents both the ontology of identity and its political
significance. The alternative view offered by poststructuralists is
that the subject is itself always already a product of discourse,
which represents both the condition of possibility for a certain
subject-position and a constraint on what forms of self-making
individuals may engage. There is no real identity—individual or
group-based—that is separable from its conditions of possibility, and
any political appeal to identity formations must engage with the
paradox of acting from the very subject-positions it must also
oppose. Central to this position is the observation that any claim to
identity must organize itself around a constitutive exclusion:

An identity is established in relation to a series of differences
that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential
to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not
exist in its distinctness and solidity. Entrenched in this
indispensable relation is a second set of tendencies, themselves in
need of exploration, to conceal established identities into fixed
forms, thought and lived as if their structure expressed the true
order of things. When these pressures prevail, the maintenance of one
identity (or field of identities) involves the conversion of some
differences into otherness, into evil, or one of its numerous
surrogates. Identity requires differences in order to be, and it
converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own
self-certainty. (Connolly 2002, 64)

The dangers of identity politics, then, are that it casts as
authentic to the self or group an identity that in fact is defined by
its opposition to an Other. Reclaiming such an identity as one's own
merely reinforces its dependence on this dominant Other, and further
internalizes and reinforces an oppressive hierarchy. While the charge
that identity politics promotes a victim mentality is often a facile
pot-shot, Wendy Brown offers a more sophisticated caution against the
dangers of ressentiment (the moralizing revenge of the
powerless). She argues that identity politics has its own genealogy in
liberal capitalism that relentlessly reinforces the “wounded
attachments” it claims to sever: “Politicized identity
thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching,
restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can
hold out no future—for itself or others—that triumphs over
this pain” (Brown 1995, 74). This challenge has been met with
more intense discussion of the temporality of identity politics: can
an identification be premised on a forward-looking solidarity rather
than a ressentiment-laden exclusion (see Zerilli 2005; Weir
2008; Bhambra and Margee 2010)? Further, what political alternatives
does the poststructuralist model imply? Proponents of identity
politics have suggested that poststructuralism is politically
impotent, capable only of deconstruction and never of action (Hartsock
1998, 205–226). Yet there are political projects motivated by
poststructuralist theses. For example, Judith Butler's famous
articulation of performativity as a way of understanding
subject-development suggests to her and others the possibility of
disarticulating seamless performances to subvert the meanings with
which they are invested (Butler 1999 [1990]). Drag can constitute such
a disarticulation, although other critics have suggested other
examples; Adrian Piper's conceptual art seeks to disrupt the presumed
self-identity of race by showing how it is actively interpreted and
reconstituted, never determinate and self-evident. Linda Zerilli
discusses the “world-building” work of the Milan Women's
Bookstore Collective—a feminist group that rejects a subject-centred
view of women's injured status in favor of a protensive practice of
freedom (2005, chapter 3).

The continuing intellectual crisis surrounding identity politics
paradoxically marks its importance to contemporary political
philosophy and practice. Both flexible and extensible, identity
political tropes continue to influence new political claims: an
extensive literature approaches disability, for example, as a diverse
and dynamic set of experiences of social injustice that sediment
self-understandings among the disabled and motivate a politics that
insists dominant cultures change their exclusionary social practices
(Wendell 1996; Davis 1997 [2006]; Silvers 1998, Siebers 2008). Perhaps
most important for philosophers, any idea of identity itself appears
to be in a period of rapid evolution. Changing technologies are having
a profound impact on our philosophical understandings of who we
are. Attempts to decode human genetics (Abu El-Haj 2007) and possibly
shape the genetic make-up of future persons (Wald 2000), to clone
human beings, or to xeno-transplant animal organs, and so on, all
raise deep philosophical questions about the kind of thing a person
is. We are capable of changing our bodies in ways that dramatically
change our identities, including through sex change or cosmetic
surgeries, with immediate consequences for the kinds of identities I
have been discussing in this essay. As more and more people form
political alliances using disembodied communications technologies, the
kinds of identities that matter seem also to shift (Turkle
1995). Behaviors, beliefs, and self-understandings are increasingly
pathologized as syndromes and disorders, including through the
identification of new “types” of person (in turn
generating possibilities for new forms of identity politics) (Elliott
2003a and 2003b; Rose 1997).

Increasingly, this long list of confounding variables for identity
political thought is finding philosophical cohesion in anti-identarian
models that take somatic life, affect, time, or space as organizing
concepts. For example, both new materialisms and neo-vitalist
philosophies, in their political contexts, share an emphasis
on becoming over being, a “posthumanist”
reluctance to award ontological priority to any shared characteristics
of human beings (Wolfe 2010), a skepticism about discourses of
authenticity and belonging, and a desire to focus on generative,
forward-looking political solutions (Bhambra and Margee 2010; Coole
and Frost 2010; Connolly 2011). The lines between humans and other
animals (Haraway 2007), between the living and the non-living (Sharp
2011), and between objects and subjects (Bennett 2009) are radically
challenged. To varying degrees these emphases are echoed in other
process ontologies within contemporary “continental”
thought—whether the ethics of self-transformation organized
around Foucault's last work (Heyes 2007), the reintroduction of bodies
as socially and biologically dynamic and intra-active forces in
forming political subjectivities (Protevi 2009), or the ways indirect,
technologically mediated experience shapes so much of our contemporary
“identities” (Turkle 2011). This mass of shifts and
contradictions might be thought to mark the end of the era of identity
politics. Whatever limits are inherent to identity political
formations, however, the unfashionableness of the phrase itself belies
the deep implication of questions of power and legitimate government
with demands for self-determination that are unlikely to fade
away.

–––. 2011. “Bodies in Alliance and the
Politics of the
Street.” Transversal. October. [Available on-line].

Combahee River Collective. 1982. “A Black Feminist
Statement,” in All the Women are White, All the Blacks are
Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, Gloria
T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (eds). New York:
Feminist Press.

Elliott, Carl. 2003a. “Does Your Patient Have A Beetle in
His Box? Language Games and Psychopathology,” in The
Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,
Cressida J. Heyes (ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

–––. 2003b. “Amputees By
Choice”. In Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the
American Dream. New York: Norton.